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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Racial Contract, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Global White Supremacy
Racism in Philosophy
Cognitive Distortion and White Ignorance
Racism’s Historical Evolution
Summary
Analysis
The traditional social contract includes an economic dimension, becuase it says that people form societies in order to accumulate property and fairly protect their rights to that property. However, the traditional social contract isn’t primarily economic in nature. In contrast, the racial contract is: it’s designed to enable “white/persons” to systematically exploit “nonwhite/subpersons.”
The traditional social contract is intended to explain the formation of legitimate governments, which serve the good of the people. In contrast, the racial contract is intended to explain the racial inequality and exploitation that have occurred for hundreds of years. In the racial contract, people form governments in order to consolidate their own power and exploit others for profit. From Mills’s perspective, the social contract covers up historical exploitation by imagining that everyone in society consented to it.
Themes
Most white historians attribute Europe’s economic dominance to developments in Europe (like culture, geographical conditions, or technological progress). But non-white historians have shown that slavery and colonialism really explain both European countries’ wealth and the enduring poverty of colonized and enslaved people and countries. As a whole, Europe has profited immensely and consistently from exploiting the non-European world.
Like the theory of the social contract, white historians’ common explanation for European economic growth replaces accurate historical explanation (Europe’s colonization of non-European nations) with a fantasy of racial supremacy. This kind of history is part of white supremacy’s system of cognitive distortion.
Themes
This process of exploitation continues today: the old colonial nations, their offshoot nations (like the U.S.), and those nations’ financial institutions and multinational corporations dominate the global economy. White people control a disproportionate and growing portion of global wealth. In fact, the economy continuously redistributes wealth from poor non-white people to already-wealthy white people.
Mills again emphasizes that, although white supremacy is no longer the letter of the law, it is still an informal norm: the same countries that used to colonize the non-European world and exploit its resources through the law now do so through private industry and international institutions, in accordance with the law. The Global South still provides the majority of the material and labor that create wealth in the Global North. Mills emphasizes that while this is a change in the form and ideology of white supremacy, the underlying structure hasn’t changed.
Themes
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Wealthy settler states like the U.S. are still systematically segregated and unequal. Non-white people have fewer economic opportunities and far less wealth, which is evidence of how the racial contract has prevented them from building wealth across generations. This is because of formal policies in addition to informal discrimination in wages, employment, capital investment, housing, education, and more.
The racial contract operates on a national scale, in addition to a global one. Although it evolves through different phases, the cumulative weight of these various phases maintains global inequality over time. Meanwhile, the racial contract’s defenders can easily say that formal inequality only existed in the past because its more explicit and severe stages have long since disappeared.
Themes
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In fact, just in the U.S., slavery and discrimination have cost Black people several trillion dollars. With interest added, the nation owes them reparations worth more than the whole country’s combined household wealth.
Looking at the actual economic costs of slavery, it’s clear that white people’s wealth in the U.S. is in large part the result of labor that was stolen from Black slaves (and the compounded interest on that labor). Today, the economy still maintains white supremacy by sustaining the power and wealth imbalances created in the past.
Themes
This evidence shows that racial exploitation is really the foundation of the U.S. economy. But moral theorists who talk about justice ignore the basic injustice of longstanding racial exploitation precisely because it’s so fundamental: challenging it means questioning the nation’s legitimacy as a whole.
Moral philosophers are concerned with explaining the legitimacy of the state and improving society. As such, the racial contract is a fundamental threat to their philosophical project, because it shows that the state is essentially based on theft, coercion, and exploitation.
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